Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Now, you can probably tell that I’m lying. If I really am O.K. with the fact that no one I loved witnessed my death, why did I come all the way back here from the dead? Why did I put on the flesh of my body, and the clothes I wore my last day on earth? Why did I resume the voice I spoke with when I was living, and return to the weight I was at the time of my death? I even washed the dirt out of my eyes and my hair, settled my teeth in the places in my mouth where they were before they got knocked out. Why did I bother doing that? It was a lot of work. I could have stayed in the ground for eternity. I could have stayed there, disintegrating, if I felt that my life was resolved. If there had not been a twinge of anxiety in me that something still needed to be said, I would still be in the ground.

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.